There is also a review of a new eco documentary, The Cove, which sounds interesting You can find it here But more interesting is the ocmment it makes part way through the review about a connection to Hitchcock You could quote some of this perhaps. The Cove is thrilling: exuberant, amusing, theatrical. Until, that is, it gets to the footage of the slaughter. Then it's horrific. Cinematical's reviewer wrote that, in a career watching horror films, "I've never seen anything quite as disturbing as the final sequences of The Cove". Leaving aside the fact that the most impressive footage in the film was, in fact, shot by a rock, it's a virtuoso piece of movie-making. To secure that 12A certificate, despite the horrors, Psihoyos aped Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene, never actually showing a harpoon piercing flesh (there's always a layer of water between them). The whole film, it turns out, was meticulously pieced together in post-production – its plot born of the cutting room, not the storyboard. "It happened organically," says Psihoyos. "We let it tell it itself." That is why The Cove succeeds. It doesn't nag or holler; it lets its audience join the dots. It's made by people with enough detachment to be sly, satiric, even aesthetic. It is the closest thing green cinema has got to its own Dr Strangelove.
and also makes some really interesting comments about film making in Hollywood.and how serious messages can't work......read on......... The lesson seems clear: eco-documentaries can't compete at the multiplex. So why don't they just ditch the doc bit altogether? Why not bite the bullet and spread the message via the medium of the blockbuster, as in Roland Emmerich's eco-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow? The main stumbling block seems to be Hollywood. In mainstream cinema, big bangs rule. Road movies rock. Nature is, by and large, an unpredictable enemy, to be tamed, not saved. Fireballs are awesome - when they're caused by an exploding helicopter. Rock crevices are dramatic – when you nip across them on a rope bridge. The most chilled-out surfing flick only climaxes once that wave has been mastered. Even films with such apparently impeccable eco-credentials as, say, Wall-E, Pixar's comedy about a world desiccated by overconsumption, look, on closer inspection, like red herrings of a new green wave. Film-makers can't really get away with films that don't chime with what children are taught in school. And it's worth remembering that the film Pixar made before Wall-E was Cars, a hymn to all things auto, whose climatic act of redemption involves road resurfacing. It's peculiar, says film theorist Christopher Frayling. "One of the staples of cinema is fear. You would have thought you could prey on that," he says. "In the 30s people were worried about maverick scientists cooking up something nasty in their garrets. In the 50s it was a nuclear worry, in the 70s it was volcanoes and earthquakes, and recently we've had films like The Matrix about a parallel digital universe. Yet no one has yet found a successful idiom for making us feel anxious about the environment." Previous attempts act as a heavy disincentive: they're either embarrassing, like last year's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which turned the nuclear threat of the 1951 original into an ecological one, or catastrophic, like Kevin Costner's Waterworld. And when film-makers have tried, they've bottled it. Danny Boyle's provocative Sunshine morphed into a standard maniac-in-space horror two-thirds of the way through. The Day After Tomorow and I Am Legend showed us that however close the human race comes to extinction, we will pull through in the end. It's dangerous – by indulging our hopes, cinema may well be adding to our difficulties, helping us kid ourselves. This brings us to The Road, John Hillcoat's forthcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bleak, post-apocalyptic horror novel. After a troubled production, it finally arrives in the UK in January, complete with moderately hopeful conclusion, including a final image one colleague described as a "cheesy freeze-frame". Quite different, then, from the end of the book – perhaps the most nihilistic, and most important, literary exploration of a post-climate change world. So, does one throw up one's hands and curse those damned studios for their avarice, their cowardice? No. Films function in a different way to books. You don't read a book on a date. You might go and see The Road, however – and so an ending that doesn't leave you wanting to jump off a cliff is part of the deal when you buy your ticket. And that's where Louie Psihoyos thinks he's cracked it. "The Cove is the ultimate date movie," he says. "I think that at the movies, women like to feel, and guys to be excited. Just about everyone likes this movie, and it's one you won't struggle to talk about over supper." And, praise be, he's right. Unless you've ordered sushi.
Why does Hollywood keep making the same films?
There is also a review of a new eco documentary, The Cove, which sounds interesting You can find it here But more interesting is the ocmment it makes part way through the review about a connection to Hitchcock You could quote some of this perhaps.
The Cove is thrilling: exuberant, amusing, theatrical. Until, that is, it gets to the footage of the slaughter. Then it's horrific. Cinematical's reviewer wrote that, in a career watching horror films, "I've never seen anything quite as disturbing as the final sequences of The Cove".
Leaving aside the fact that the most impressive footage in the film was, in fact, shot by a rock, it's a virtuoso piece of movie-making. To secure that 12A certificate, despite the horrors, Psihoyos aped Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene, never actually showing a harpoon piercing flesh (there's always a layer of water between them). The whole film, it turns out, was meticulously pieced together in post-production – its plot born of the cutting room, not the storyboard. "It happened organically," says Psihoyos. "We let it tell it itself."
That is why The Cove succeeds. It doesn't nag or holler; it lets its audience join the dots. It's made by people with enough detachment to be sly, satiric, even aesthetic. It is the closest thing green cinema has got to its own Dr Strangelove.
and also makes some really interesting comments about film making in Hollywood.and how serious messages can't work......read on.........
The lesson seems clear: eco-documentaries can't compete at the multiplex. So why don't they just ditch the doc bit altogether? Why not bite the bullet and spread the message via the medium of the blockbuster, as in Roland Emmerich's eco-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow?
The main stumbling block seems to be Hollywood. In mainstream cinema, big bangs rule. Road movies rock. Nature is, by and large, an unpredictable enemy, to be tamed, not saved. Fireballs are awesome - when they're caused by an exploding helicopter. Rock crevices are dramatic – when you nip across them on a rope bridge. The most chilled-out surfing flick only climaxes once that wave has been mastered.
Even films with such apparently impeccable eco-credentials as, say, Wall-E, Pixar's comedy about a world desiccated by overconsumption, look, on closer inspection, like red herrings of a new green wave. Film-makers can't really get away with films that don't chime with what children are taught in school. And it's worth remembering that the film Pixar made before Wall-E was Cars, a hymn to all things auto, whose climatic act of redemption involves road resurfacing.
It's peculiar, says film theorist Christopher Frayling. "One of the staples of cinema is fear. You would have thought you could prey on that," he says. "In the 30s people were worried about maverick scientists cooking up something nasty in their garrets. In the 50s it was a nuclear worry, in the 70s it was volcanoes and earthquakes, and recently we've had films like The Matrix about a parallel digital universe. Yet no one has yet found a successful idiom for making us feel anxious about the environment."
Previous attempts act as a heavy disincentive: they're either embarrassing, like last year's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which turned the nuclear threat of the 1951 original into an ecological one, or catastrophic, like Kevin Costner's Waterworld. And when film-makers have tried, they've bottled it. Danny Boyle's provocative Sunshine morphed into a standard maniac-in-space horror two-thirds of the way through. The Day After Tomorow and I Am Legend showed us that however close the human race comes to extinction, we will pull through in the end. It's dangerous – by indulging our hopes, cinema may well be adding to our difficulties, helping us kid ourselves.
This brings us to The Road, John Hillcoat's forthcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bleak, post-apocalyptic horror novel. After a troubled production, it finally arrives in the UK in January, complete with moderately hopeful conclusion, including a final image one colleague described as a "cheesy freeze-frame". Quite different, then, from the end of the book – perhaps the most nihilistic, and most important, literary exploration of a post-climate change world.
So, does one throw up one's hands and curse those damned studios for their avarice, their cowardice? No. Films function in a different way to books. You don't read a book on a date. You might go and see The Road, however – and so an ending that doesn't leave you wanting to jump off a cliff is part of the deal when you buy your ticket.
And that's where Louie Psihoyos thinks he's cracked it. "The Cove is the ultimate date movie," he says. "I think that at the movies, women like to feel, and guys to be excited. Just about everyone likes this movie, and it's one you won't struggle to talk about over supper." And, praise be, he's right. Unless you've ordered sushi.